It was yet another holiday shortened week, this time occasioned by Martin Luther King’s birthday, and mortgage application activity was down. The Mortgage Bankers Association’s (MBA’s) Market Composite Index, a measure of mortgage loan application volume, decreased 3.0 percent on a seasonally adjusted basis from one week earlier and was down 10 percent on an unadjusted basis. The data was further adjusted to account for the holiday. The seasonally adjusted Purchase Index was 2 percent lower than during the week ended January 18 and it declined by 6 percent on an unadjusted basis. The unadjusted index was also down 7 percent from the same week in 2018. The Refinance Index fell 6 percent compared to the previous week and the share of applications that were for refinancing was 42.0 percent compared…(read more)